Free thought

“ What does concern us is this, that thereby there should come into consciousness as content the sense that man has liberty in his spirit as the altogether absolute, that free-will is the Notion of man. Freedom is just thought itself; he who casts thought aside and speaks of freedom knows not what he is talking of. The unity of thought with itself is freedom, the free will. ”

“ The significance of the traditional discussion of free will is that it reflects precisely a separation of moral activity from nature and the public life of men.
One has to turn from moral theories to the general human struggle for political, economic and religious liberty, for freedom of thought, speech, assemblage and creed, to find significant reality in the conception of freedom of will. Then one finds himself out of the stiflingly close atmosphere of an inner consciousness and in the open-air world. ”

“ What we mean by the "freedom" of the will is not ability to do anything without thinking, but ability to think all the alternatives together and to act on this larger thought. Free action is the fullest expression of thought and of the Self which thinks it. ”

“ Thus thought is "free" when it is free from certain kinds of outward control which are often present. Some of these kinds of control which must be absent if thought is to be "free" are obvious, but others are more subtle and elusive. ”

“ Truth is the free thought, the free idea, the free spirit; truth is what is free from you, what is not your own, what is not in your power. But truth is also the completely unindependent, impersonal, unreal, and incorporeal; truth cannot step forward as you do, cannot move, change, develop; truth awaits and receives everything from you, and itself is only through you; for it exists only - in your head. You concede that the truth is a thought, but say that not every thought is a true one, or, as you are also likely to express it, not every thought is truly and really a thought. ”

“ We are merely conscious of the existence of thought, of feeling, of volition; and we are so made, that we are compelled to believe that there is something which thinks, and feels, and wills. It is thus, by what has been called a fundamental law of belief, that we arrive at the knowledge of the existence of our minds. In like manner, from the fact of consciousness that we do act, or put forth volitions, we are forced, by a fundamental law of belief, to yield to the conviction that we are free. ”

“ As to the first of these, the freedom of thought, mind by being relieved from all danger of any arbitrary interference from the physical world, has at once the conscious right of independent procedure and the positive assurance of its thinking, thus free and independent, being quite practical or applicable; for plainly the freedom is in, not from, the material world. ”

“ Therefore, dare to be free, dare to go as far as your thought leads, and dare to carry that out in your life. ”

“ In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellow-men, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death. ”

“ Freedom of thought, and the free utterance of thought, are, to a great degree, suppressed, on the part of a large portion of the poem in all countries, by their dependence upon the will amid favor of others, for that employment by which they must obtain their daily bread. ”

“ I want to do what little I can to make my country truly free, to broaden the intellectual horizon of our people, to destroy the prejudices born of ignorance and fear, to do away with the blind worship of the ignoble past, with the idea that all the great and good are dead, that the living are totally depraved, that all pleasures are sins, that sighs and groans are alone pleasing to God, that thought is dangerous, that intellectual courage is a crime, that cowardice is a virtue, that a certain belief is necessary to secure salvation, that to carry a cross in this world will give us a palm in the next, and that we must allow some priest to be the pilot of our souls.
Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book, and creed, and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free. ”

“ "I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second "Essais" and see no reason why his definition of Free Will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. ”

“ The art of seeing, the art of knowing what you see; the art of comparing, of perceiving true likenesses and true differences, and so of classifying and arranging what you see: the art of connecting facts together in your own mind in chains of cause and effect, and that accurately, patiently, calmly, without prejudice, vanity, or temper—this is what is wanted for true freedom of mind. But accuracy, patience, freedom from prejudice, carelessness for all except the truth, whatever the truth may be—are not these the virtues of a truly free spirit? ”

“ It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. ”

“ But can it be maintained that the same truth holds good of our consciousness of freedom? Is it possible to hold that determinist arguments are of so convincing a character as to enable us to perceive at the moment of action the untrustworthy nature of our consciousness that we are free to choose between alternatives and to grasp beneath the appearance the underlying necessity which rules our wills? Our actual consciousness of freedom is not seriously disputed. ”

“ How far, and in what sense, can action which is determined by motives be said to be free? For a long time the advocates of free-will, in their eagerness to preserve moral responsibility, went so far as to deny all motives as influencing moral action. ”

“ I am neither a student nor a philosopher, but I would like some convinced exponent of the doctrine of Free Will to explain how we are anything but the helpless victims of the consequences of the acts of other people. ”

“ Such a doctrine is repugnant to our natural sense, and contradicts our own consciousness and inward experience. We feel that we are free, and all human action proceeds on the principle of supposing man to be free. We teach and we punish. ”

“ I thus disclaim openly on the threshold all pretension to prove to you that the freedom of the will is true. The most I hope is to induce some of you to follow my own example in assuming it true, and acting as if it were true. If it be true, it seems to me that this is involved in the strict logic of the case. Its truth ought not to be forced willy-nilly down our indifferent throats. It ought to be freely espoused by men who can equally well turn their backs upon it. In other words, our first act of freedom, if we are free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free. ”

“ This accountability, recognized in conscience and exacted by the constitution of the108 world, is an omnipresent and inerasable reality. So must free-will also be. Freedom is part of the moral idea, and the idea falls apart and lapses into contradiction and confusion without it. The same necessity that obliges us to accept the truth of morality itself, obliges us to assert free-will as an attribute of a moral nature and a condition of moral agency. ”

“ That much at least of possible 'truth' the terms will then have in them.
Let me take up another well-worn controversy, THE FREE-WILL PROBLEM. Most persons who believe in what is called their free-will do so after the rationalistic fashion. It is a principle, a positive faculty or virtue added to man, by which his dignity is enigmatically augmented. He ought to believe it for this reason. Determinists, who deny it, who say that individual men originate nothing, but merely transmit to the future the whole push of the past cosmos of which they are so small an expression, diminish man. ”

“ WILL.
We lay it down as a first principle—from which we can no more depart than from the consciousness of existence—that man is free; and therefore stand ready to embrace whatever is fairly included in the definition of freedom. ”

“ Now our judgment of others must of necessity be derived from our own consciousness, and if we regard and treat them as freely willing beings, it can only be because we know that our own wills are free. ”

“ Our freedom is not complete, it is in the making.... The process by which freedom is won is the process of enlightenment. It is the truth that sets men free, the clear perception of moral relations and moral laws, the understanding of human nature and its true needs. ”

“ But only external freedom, the only freedom they often know. They are unaware that they forfeit thereby the real, the inner freedom. “Thou aimest at free heights,” admonishes even the most impetuous herald of freedom, [pg 270] “thy soul is athirst for stars. But also thy wicked impulses are athirst for freedom. Thy wild hounds want to be free, they bark joyfully in their kennel when thy spirit essays to throw open all dungeons.”11 They think to be free and speak of the self-assurance of individual reason, and they cannot see that the mind is in the fetters of bondage. ”

“ And indeed, if we examine closely, we shall find that this feeling, of our being able to modify our own character if we wish, is itself the feeling of moral freedom which we are conscious of. A person feels morally free who feels that his habits or his temptations are not his masters, but he theirs ”

“ Considered instead, from the particular point of view, ceasing to be an abstraction, and becoming a way, a means, liberty is understood. It is thus that we call for the freedom of thought, which is to say the power, without external hindrance, to express thoughts in speech or in writing, in the manner in which they present themselves in the mind. It is thus the integral expression of the thought which is the goal pursued, and not liberty. ”

“ We have not yet seen how a free people exercises its freedom. We have not seen in real life the practical application of the principles which we preach. Here all is spread before our gaze in a vast tableau. ”

“ In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs ”

“ Obedience to this law of not pitting our wills against the wills of other people leads to new freedom in all sorts of ways,—in connection with little, everyday questions, as to whether a thing is one color or another, as well as in the great and serious problems of life. If, in an argument, we feel confident that all we want is the truth,—that we do not care whether we or our opponents are in the right, as long as we find the right itself,—then we are free, so far as personal feeling is concerned ”

“ Men say to themselves and to one another, "Yes, I shall be freer to act, I shall be nobler in my action, but I shall certainly enchain mind and spirit, I shall certainty bind myself to think, away from the rich freedom of thought in which I have been inclined to live." ”

“ For, supposing man not to be originally free, let us ask how is the end of human liberty to be attained? Is it to be attained by passively imbibing the various impressions forced upon us from without? Is it to be attained by yielding ourselves up in pliant obedience to the manifold modifications which stamp their moulds upon us from within? ”

“ Granting these two principles, the inert and the self-directive, the necessary and the free, we obtain the materials for a universe, without disputing the fact of human liberty and bringing into suspicion even the possibility either of morality or immorality. ”

“ The truth is, All might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they ought. ”

“ It can, I conceive, be made quite clear that the assertion, "The will is free," is one without meaning, until we analyze more fully the different meanings to be attached to the word free. Now this word has a perfectly well-defined signification in every-day life. We say that anything is free when it is not subject to external constraint. We also know exactly what we mean when we say that a man is free to do a certain act. ”

“ When you speak to us plainly, you have to say that you really understand a man to be free, and free in no other sense than a falling stone, or than running water. In the one case there is as little necessity as in the other, and just as much freedom. ”

“ By thus making a barrier between subject and object, such personal and private things become a prison to the intellect. The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire of knowledge—knowledge as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is possible for man to attain. ”

“ At the tail end of a lengthy series of writers, from Augustine to Martineau, and from Spinoza to William James, one might well be excused the assumption that nothing new remains to be said on so well-worn a topic as that of Free-Will. ”

“ And shall the natural degree of the human mind be free, and be permitted to roam in unrestrained freedom over the broad plain of scientific truth, while the spiritual degree of the mind is enslaved and held in bondage? ”